Darren A. Bryant

Mapping the Terrain of Educational Leadership and Management in East Asia.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to gain perspective on the extent to which the vision for knowledge production in East Asia set forth by Bajunid, Cheng, Hallinger, Walker, Dimmock and others almost 20 years ago has been fulfilled. The authors undertook an effort to map the terrain of knowledge production in educational leadership and management in East Asia since the year 2000. Their method of mapping this terrain involves the analysis of trends in publication of articles about and/or from East Asia in eight core educational leadership and management journals.Design/methodology/approach – The authors’ methodology employed a descriptive, quantitative form of literature review. They identified a clearly delimited body of literature, comprised of all articles published about or from East Asia between 2000 and 2011 in eight core educational leadership and management journals. Then they employed a systematic search for information within that literature and analyzed trends across the studies. This allow...

International Patterns in Principal Preparation: Commonalities and Variations in Pre-service Programmes

This article illuminates major features of high-quality leadership programmes across different education systems. We do so by focusing on capturing commonalities and variations in high-quality pre-service programmes from five differing societies, all of which are high-performing education systems. To this end, we first delineate key profiles of each programme. Based on that, we discuss commonalities and variations in leadership programmes in terms of framework, content and operational features. Finally, we flesh out important implications for policy and practice.

Review of research publications on educational leadership and management in Asia: a comparative analysis of three regions

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which calls over the past 15 years for increased empirical research on educational leadership and management in Asia have yielded increased knowledge production. The study analyses trends in research about and/or from Asia published in eight core educational leadership journals between 2000 and 2011. We provide an overall picture of the volume and impact of knowledge production in the region, as well as insights into change in the rate of knowledge production from the region over time. The study employs a comparative lens, specifically analysing differences in knowledge production capacity and impact across West, South and East Asia. These comparative analyses extend further to understanding variations in the contributions of different societies and universities across Asia. Although the research identified a disappointing level of overall publication in the region, interesting patterns were revealed with respect to the distribution of publications both across and within the three regions of Asia. Taken together the results suggest that progress in developing an ‘Asian knowledge base’ in this field remains stunted, and that regional capacity to produce empirical knowledge continues to be limited to selected societies and universities.

HISTORICAL EMPATHY AND CANADA: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY

In this article, we examine the CBC/Radio ‐ Canada series, Canada: A People’s History , for its use of empathy, specifically with regard to its portrayal of Aboriginal people. We call the empathy promoted in the series, emotive empathy, and compare it to the concept of historical empathy constructed by researchers in history education. The emotive empathy employed in this series, while adequate for public audiences, is not sufficient for history classrooms because it lacks a cognitive dimension. We discuss implications for using the series, and by extension, other instructional resources, to promote the development of historical empathy. Key Words: history teaching, historical empathy, history and film, narrative strategies, Aboriginal representations Dans cet article, les auteurs analysent le recours a l’empathie dans la serie Le Canada : une histoire populaire / Canada: A People’s History de Radio ‐ Canada / CBC, surtout pour ce qui a trait a la representation des autochtones. Les auteurs qualifient d’empathie emotive l’empathie promue dans la serie et la compare au concept d’empathie historique developpe par les chercheurs qui etudient l’enseignement de l’histoire. L’empathie emotive utilisee dans cette serie, bien qu’adequate pour le grand public, ne l’est pas pour les cours d’histoire parce qu’il manque alors une dimension cognitive. Les auteurs analysent les implications de l’utilisation de cette serie et, d’une maniere plus generale, d’autres ressources pedagogiques par rapport a la promotion de l’empathie historique. Mots cles : enseignement de l’histoire, empathie historique, histoire et films, strategies narratives, representation des autochtones

Synthesis of findings from 15 years of educational reform in Thailand: lessons on leading educational change in East Asia

The past two decades have been a period of active education reform throughout much of the world, and East Asia is no exception. This paper synthesizes findings from a series of empirical studies of educational reform in Thailand where an ambitious educational reform law was adopted in 1999. The purpose is to identify lessons learned about educational leadership and change that may be applicable both in Thailand and other parts of East Asia. The studies reveal successful reorientation of the nation’s educational system around a new vision and education goals. However, the vision of change has been much slower to penetrate the daily practice of Thailand’s 35,000 principals and 400,000 teachers. The paper identifies factors that are impacting successful reform in Thailand and draws implications for leading educational reform and change in the East Asia region.

How much of a difference do principals make? An analysis of between-schools variation in academic achievement in Hong Kong public secondary schools

This article aims to explain the role principals play in the variation in academic achievement between secondary schools in Hong Kong. The article draws on survey data from 179 key staff and 2,037 students from 42 schools. The study uses 2 analytical approaches. First, it employs classification and regression tree analysis (CART). This was used to sort out the most significant leadership practices associated with student achievement. Second, based on first-stage analysis, the study further explores the effects of leadership practices on academic achievement using hierarchical linear modelling (HLM). Results indicate that transparent and efficient communication structures as managed by principals explained approximately 12% of between-schools variation in academic achievement. Leadership practices related to quality assurance and accountability and resource management also contributed to explaining between-schools variation in academic achievement, yet they had negative effects on student achievement. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Exploring features of highly productive research contexts in Asia: a comparison of knowledge production in educational leadership in Israel and Hong Kong

A recent review of research identified two Asian societies that represented “positive outliers” in the production of published knowledge on educational leadership and management: Hong Kong and Israel. These were the only Asian societies that had produced a critical mass of publications in this field in international journals over the past two decades. The current study examined the nature of the publication corpus from Hong Kong and Israel in an effort to understand factors that may have contributed to this capacity for high research productivity. The results suggested that different strategies may have accounted for research capacity development in these two societies. Directions are identified for future research.

A Review of the Linkage between Student Participation in the International Baccalaureate Continuum and Student Learning Attributes.

Given the rapid growth in the number of students completing the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme and the potential for students to be educated entirely through IB programmes, it is important to understand associations between programme participation and cognitive and non-cognitive learning attributes. Through a mixed methods study, this research considers evidence derived from Diploma Programme examinations, a newly designed and validated student questionnaire, and complementary case studies to examine plausible explanations for associations between IB programmes and learning attributes.

Development and Validation of the International Baccalaureate Learner Profile Questionnaire (IBLPQ).

The Learner Profile (LP) frames International Baccalaureate (IB) learning outcomes across the three programme levels and, as such, plays a key role in measuring the success of the rapidly growing number of IB schools in the Asia-Pacific Region. Our aim was to develop an instrument to measure the IBLP and validate the instrument through a series of psychometric procedures. Results showed solid construct validity and measurement reliability, alongside content validity from our Delphi studies and cross-validation with different samples. Given the growing number of IB schools in the Asia-Pacific, we believe that the development of the IBLP questionnaire (IBLPQ) contributes to the international research community and educators interested in exploring the relationship between student outcomes and the LP. Importantly, given the current absence of systematically designed and tested survey instruments to measure the LP, we expect the IBLPQ will become a key initial resource for a wide range of stakeholders.

Conditions that support middle leaders’ work in organisational and system leadership: Hong Kong case studies

ABSTRACT This study builds on research which contends that just as effective principals must lead across a broad purview of responsibilities in order to build successful schools, so too must middle leaders. Decentralisation of school management has resulted in an expansion of school principals’ responsibilities, contributing to a further distribution of leadership responsibility to middle leaders. This conception of middle leadership requires a shift in understanding of the nature of middle leaders’ work. There is vast potential for middle leaders to contribute to their schools beyond subject administration, yet the research base yields limited insight on such work and on how middle leaders can be supported to accomplish it. This research finds that middle leaders who expand their leadership responsibilities do so in contexts that utilise school mission, policy enactment and organisational design as platforms for enhanced middle leadership.